Gaston Bachelard Quotes
-
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
-
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
-
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
-
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
-
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
-
The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
-
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
-
The reflected world is the conquest of calm
-
Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
-
The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
-
There is no original truth, only original error.
-
The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
-
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
-
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
-
A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
-
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
-
It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
-
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
-
Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
-
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
-
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
-
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
-
Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
-
It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.